Exploring Cross-Device Web Use on PCs and Mobile Devices

  • Authors:

  • Shaun K. Kane;Amy K. Karlson;Brian R. Meyers;Paul Johns;Andy Jacobs;Greg Smith

  • Affiliations:

  • The Information School, DUB Group, University of Washington, Seattle, USA 98195;Microsoft Research, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, USA 98052;Microsoft Research, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, USA 98052;Microsoft Research, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, USA 98052;Microsoft Research, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, USA 98052;Microsoft Research, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, USA 98052

  • Venue:
  • INTERACT '09 Proceedings of the 12th IFIP TC 13 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Part I
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

In this paper, we explore whether sharing a user's web browsing activity across their computing devices can make it easier to find and access web sites on a mobile device. We first surveyed 175 smartphone users about their web use across multiple devices. We found that users shared web information between devices, but generally used cumbersome manual methods to do so. In a second study, we tracked the web sites visited by 14 participants on their PC and mobile phone, and used experience-sampling surveys to determine whether sharing sites across devices would be useful. We found that participants visited many of the same sites on both their mobile device and PC, and that participants were interested in viewing additional sites from their PC on their mobile device. Our results suggest that automatically sharing web activity information between devices has potential to improve the usability of the mobile web.